Also the aggressors standing up at Eielson AFB, AK are going to be "Big Mouth" Block-30s from the 80th FS at Kunsan AB, Korea, right??!!

That was the plan I'd headrd, but the 18th isn't going to use all of the 80th assigned tails are they?

Hill might be swamped, and Korea is just a days flight....in the grand scheme of things, why wouldn't they spend 2 days worth of transit time to send a jet thru depot level mod? They deploy jets from CONUS to the Pacific for excercises and vice-versa....why not for heavy modification?

More people have died driving with Ted Kennedy than hunting with Dick Cheney.

Folks....the mishap bird is not a Block 30 but a Block 40. If you watch the video, during the close up sweep (at about 33 sec.) you can see a flash of green tint and the outline of the B40 WAR HUD, and the landing lights on the NLG door are clearly visible.

It's tough to get a clear tail number from the video quality but could it be 88-0544 which was last based with the 524th at Cannon? Since the 524th stood down, they were prolly en route to Osan as replacements (and hence, no tail codes).